
Okay, the first proper difference that I will mention between the two countries is the existence / non-existence of this (at first sights) apparently humble and unexceptional brand of fizzy drink.
My first can of Mountain Dew was late one evening in the Summer '07, when I first visited New York City. It was an epiphany.
Growing up in GB, I came to know lemonade as the ever-sweet, ever-reliable, but ever so slightly boring soft-drink staple. The kind of thing to have at a School disco when you're 13 and want to get to sleep by 11pm by avoiding the caffeine of coke. It bubbles benign and transluscent in bottles of Schweppes, Tesco value, 7-UP and Sprite etc. That was what I thought.
Mountain Dew is also a "lemonade" in name, but really closer to a form of rocket fuel. It seems to contain a tonne of sugar and gives a powerful kick of caffeine. So much so, the caffeine version is banned in Canada. If spilled, you will notice that it has a luminous greeny-yellow colour, similar to the radioactive stuff that oozes out of Mr Burn's Springfield Nuclear Power plant. A bottle of it - the true the blissful saccharine, with yellow stained mouth and beaded bubbles twinkling at the brim (as Keats might say) - is enough to give quite a buzz and a night of insomnia.
Though Britain doesn't have Mountain Dew - parent co Pepsi withdrew it after 2 years of poor UK sales in 1998 - it seems (from wikipedia research) that it may be re-launched next year, or even this year in GB.
Though Britain lacks Mountain Dew, it is one lemon-flavoured drink up on America: the ever-reliable sore-throat analgesic, Lemsip. My throat was a little painful the other week and I was forced to trek across Manhattan to Brit-themed shop Myers of Keswick, which is apparently the only shop in town that sells the stuff (also where New Yorkers should go for their Weetabix, Marmite, Tea, Chocolate Hob Knobs and Cornish Pasties). Americans have a range of their own elixirs for colds, as well as various soothing drinks, but they are not quite the same. Lemsip is somehow a cult symbol of Britishness I feel ; something to do with our stoic attitude to dealing with chilly weather and colds. After all, our erstwhile Poet Laureate Andrew Motion used to drink it each morning he sought a satisfactorily grim muse to express the feelings of the nation.
Outside Britain, it is sold in Australasia but apparently not used in most / any of the rest of Europe (I remember my German exchange friend being very impressed by it when he had to deal with a cold on his trip to England) . If any of my US colleagues are ill later with a cold, later in the year, they can have Lemsip protection, as I've put my left-over sachets in our office kitchen cupboard.
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